Thursday, December 18. 2008

According to the latest report from AdMob, 42% of all requests from iPhones to Admob's partners worldwide are coming in over WiFi instead of through the networks of mobile operators. This puts the iPhone in a league of its own, given that on average, AdMob is only seeing about 10-20% of all requests from Wifi capable phones actually coming in from WiFi networks. From T-Mobile's Android phone, for example, only about 10% of all requests were made on WiFi.

The iPod Touch and the PlayStation Portable come in at number two (28%) and three (13.1%) with respect to WiFi usage in the US. Only a few Blackberry devices are WiFi capable, but even from those that are, like the Pearl and Curve, only 1% of the requests were on WiFi.

Implications:

(1) As Smartphones start to look more like PC's, their users will use them more like PC's and that means WiFi as the preferred technical / financial bundle

(2) As more people buy these sorts of devices, they will rely less on 3+ G transmission - as most research shows, c 60% of the time mobile people are not "mobile", just sitting somewhere else. That's easy to serve via WiFi - and with places like Pret A Manger now serving free WiFi with coffee, WiFi appearing in planes & trains etc, the "Mobile" network will increasingly be relegated to fill in service given its current pricing structure.

Oooh, you never did write up the Chinwag Live Search & Location Based Services panel event did you... the contributions of Adrian Drury of The Cloud and Felix Petersen from Plazes / Nokia are probably most relevant in this "context" http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinwaglive or (sheesh!) my write up: http://tinyurl.com/53a5fp)

Unsuprisingly this post is still moreish, and the topic of discussion it recalls most vividly for me from that night's on and off-podcast chat was the (unpalatable to MNO's and...?) fact that most people's movements are quite unvarying (ie. I know where my local Starbucks / Tesco's / whatever is, so why do I need local maps or mobile social recommendation?)

To paraphphrase - our movements mostly are: home » work » supermarket » home with some ocassional and weekendish deviations (especially for the young un-attached peeps - but less than they probably imagine); and then there's the significant but still minority holiday and work-traveller market.

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